


Dreams

by overlycompensatedapprentice



Category: The Greatest Showman (2017)
Genre: Angst, F/M, Fluff, Nightmares, also dad pt is what i LIVE FOR, poor bby
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-13
Updated: 2018-02-13
Packaged: 2019-03-18 00:34:32
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,142
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13670574
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/overlycompensatedapprentice/pseuds/overlycompensatedapprentice
Summary: What I thought Phillip might dream about while unconscious





	Dreams

_Phillip ran through the fire. Racing through flames, ignoring the pain, feeling his skin burn, breathing in more smoke with every bit of air his lungs tried desperately to take. He needed to find Anne, she was still in here, he couldn’t lose her. He tried calling her name but his voice wouldn’t work. There was just too much smoke. His head was spinning, dark spots dancing in his eyes, legs on the verge of buckling._

_He couldn’t go on much longer. He had to find Anne before he collapsed._

_Where was she?_

_P_ _hillip stumbled into the arena_ _and saw her. Anne stood on the opposite side of the arena from him._

_T_ _he rest of the circus performers stood with her, all seemingly unaffected by the smoke. They all looked grim, staring at him like he was a dead man walking._

_W.D. tightly held Anne’s hand, Charles looked at him with sad eyes. Lettie reached out and beckoned him closer._

_He started to make his way towards them, but halfway across the stage, Phillip ran smack into something solid. It was some kind of barrier that he couldn’t see, between him and the performers. Between him and Anne. Anne ran to it, too, and placed her hand on the barrier, his name on her lips._

_Phillip did the same on the other side._

_The funny thing was, it was almost as if he could feel her hand holding onto his._

_The other circus performers surrounded Anne now, all murmuring things to Phillip that he couldn’t hear._

_That’s when the floor began to crumble. Not on the side of the circus performers and Anne, but on his side, widening chasm speeding towards him._

_Lettie looked him dead in the eye. She looked like she had been crying. When she spoke, Phillip could hear her crystal clearly. “I know you probably can’t hear me, but you’d better wake up soon, you stupid kid. We need you back. Can’t have a circus without our ringleader. We can’t lose you.”_

_And then the chasm reached him and Phillip fell, a silent cry forming on his lips as the darkness swallowed him._

 

The circus performers were gathered silently around the hospital bed.

Phillip lay there unmoving, not an inch of skin unburnt. His body wrapped in bandages to stop the bleeding and keep the injuries from getting worse.

Anne holding his still, bandaged hand, with her other hand clutched in W.D.’s. No one was beyond tears.

The doctors had delivered their verdict. They had done all they could, Phillip would have to fight this one on his own. Win if he could. If he lost….

He had done everything for them. Helped them meet the queen, taken up the post of ringleader when P.T. had disappeared on them, and run into the fire because he thought Anne was in danger.

“This is my fault,” Anne sobbed. “He ran back in there for me. Phillip…”

“Don’t you think like that, honey,” Lettie said shakily, tears staining her face. “That boy would have run back into that fire for any of us. That’s just the way he is. And you know that he would run into a thousand fires for you. He’s head over heels.”

“Stupid kid,” Charlie muttered, looking down at Phillip’s still body as he said it. “Stupid, stupid kid. Goddamned stupid brave heroic selfless stupid kid.”

They sat in silence after that. Silent for a long time as they watched Phillip, lying there: still and pale, chest barely rising and falling. They sat until the silence was broken by the nurses who had been watching them since they had arrived.

There was whispering from the other side of the hospital. Over by the desk, there were nurses whispering, staring at the performers gathered around Phillip. Some of them simply glared.

“Lettie, Charlie, Anne,” W.D. said softly. “We should go. We don’t need another scene. Especially not here.”

“I’m staying,” Anne said quickly. “Someone should be with him.”

W.D. said nothing, simply nodding. There was nothing to say. W.D. knew that for better or worse, his sister loved Phillip Carlyle. That’s all there was to it. W.D. just hoped that the man woke up, for his sister’s sake.

Charlie and W.D. made their way toward the hospital door, but Lettie lingered at Phillip’s side for just a moment. She knelt down beside his bed and said “I know you probably can’t hear me, but you’d better wake up soon you stupid kid. We need you back. We can’t have a circus without a ringleader. We can’t lose you.” Her voice broke and she squeezed Anne’s hand and left without saying anything more.

Anne sat by his side, whispering hymns and prayers. Her world narrowed to just her and Phillip and his hospital bed. Then she felt a hand on her shoulder. She glanced up. Standing beside her, eyes pricked with tears, was P.T. Barnum, Charity and the girls right behind. On the other side, a very safe distance from the bed were Phillip’s parents.

 

_More fire, but Phillip was above it this time. That was the first thing he became aware of as the darkness faded. He sat up, leaning against his hands for support, and took in his surroundings._

_He sat against foreboding iron bars, dangling in mid-air from some sort of tightrope, precariously hanging over the flames. The flames were slowly melting the tightrope, eventually, the rope wouldn’t be able to bear Phillip’s weight. If the wire snapped and his cage fell, he was dead._

_He needed to get out of the thing. He needed to escape._

_He went to move his hands from behind him, where he had been using them to sit up but found he couldn’t. His hands were tied, the ropes suddenly there, winding themselves around his wrists, cutting off his escape plan._ _Phillip struggled, but the knots were too strong, he couldn’t break free. He kicked at the door of the cage but it wouldn’t budge either. He was trapped. Completely at the mercy of the fire, the cage and the tightrope._

_He looked around desperately, searching for something that could help him get free. There was nothing but the fiery chasm below him, and the tightrope above. He kicked the door again, but to no avail._

_He called for help. It was the only thing he could think of to do. He was panicked, the smoke suffocating him, the ropes cutting into his wrists, the tightrope becoming more and more frayed by the moment. Someone, anyone, might hear his plea. Nobody answered. Phillip tried again, crying louder this time. Once again, nothing._

_Phillip began to despair. Then he heard the voices. Voices in the darkness, faint, Phillip could barely make them out, but they were there._

_His head whipped around wildly, trying to judge where the voices were coming from. They sounded like they came from the darkness above, near where the tightrope stretched into darkness. Impossible though it seemed, Phillip looked up. He didn’t see anyone. Then he looked down and gasped. Standing in the flames, waiting for their son to fall, were Phillip’s parents._

_They didn’t look concerned, no shock that they were standing in fire, no worry for his safety in their eyes. They simply waited for him to fall down to them. They said something Phillip couldn’t hear, and his mother beckoned_ _him,_   _as if he could move. Maybe it was Phillip’s imagination, but the rope on his hands seemed to tighten when he locked eyes with his parents. Phillip would rather fall into flame and burn than go to them. That seemed like his only option at this point. Well, the best option, anyway. At least he’d get out of the cage._

_Then, the voices from above came again, a little louder this time. The light from the fire leaped and illuminated something Phillip hadn’t seen before. A platform at the end of the tightrope, not unlike the one Anne and W.D. used for some of their trapeze stunts._

_Standing on the platform, their faces pale and ghostlike from the light of the fire, were the Barnums. P.T. and Charity stood closest to the edge, the frantic concern and love absent in Phillip’s parents’ faces present in theirs. Caroline and Helen stood behind them, both hysterically sobbing._

_It made Phillip’s heart ache to see them like that, and he wanted to call out to them, tell them he’d be fine, but he wasn’t so sure about that. He wanted nothing more than to be up there with them, but he couldn’t see how they could possibly save him. He couldn’t see how he could save himself. Phillip locked eyes with Phineas, and somehow he heard him speak. “Phillip, I’m so sorry.” Phillip heard a crack and felt himself go weightless. The rope had snapped. He closed his eyes as he fell, helpless to do anything. Then the fall stopped with a jolt. Phillip looked up with a start._

_There was absolutely no way that it should have been possible, but Phineas had pulled the tightrope enough for Phillip’s cage to slide across the rope, and close enough for the Barnums to catch him before he fell. Phineas shouldn’t have been able to hold the weight of both the cage and Phillip, even with Charity’s help, but somehow they managed to pull Phillip to safety. Phillip glanced back down at the fire, looking to see if his parents were there, but they were gone. Phineas pulled a silver key out of his pocket and unlocked the door to Phillip’s cage, pulled it open, and helped Phillip out easily. Once he was out, Phineas and Charity wrapped their arms around him, holding him close, away from the fire. They didn’t try to free his hands, but Phillip didn’t really mind at that moment._

_“You have to wake up, Phillip,” Charity whispered, still holding him tightly. “There’s no way the girls can lose their brother, and we can’t lose our boy.” “Chairy’s right,” Phineas said. Then he shook his head. He looked like he was crying._

_“You’d better wake up. I need my over compensated apprentice back. I need my boy back…” He stepped away, turning Phillip around. He struggled with the knots binding Phillip’s hands, but he couldn’t seem to free him. Just then, Phillip’s knees buckled, and he collapsed to the floor of the platform. Phineas looked at Charity and said something. Charity nodded reluctantly._

_Caroline approached Phillip, still lying on the ground. She leaned down and kissed his forehead. “Come back to us, Phillip,” she whispered. “Please.”_

_“We love you, Phillip,” Helen said softly._

_The Barnums faded away and vanished, and Phillip was left alone in the darkness._

The Barnums raced to Phillip’s side without hesitation, Phineas and Charity in the lead. The concern and love that showed on their faces showed Anne how truly they thought of themselves as Phillip’s parents. Looking at the barely concealed indifference on the faces of his real parents, Anne could see why.

It made her so irrationally angry. Their son was dying in a hospital bed after running into a burning building and Phillip’s parents couldn’t bother to even come within three feet of him. She thought the universe cruel to give such a wonderful, kind man such awful, heartless parents.

“Phillip,” Phineas whispered to Phillip’s unconscious form. “I’m so sorry. I abandoned you. All of you.”

He looked at Anne meaningfully. She knew that the apology was directed to her as well. Anne said nothing to blame or excuse him. The man was obviously distressed at the thought of losing someone he thought of as a son. If Anne had been thinking about how Phineas had abandoned them all, she might not have known what to feel. She wasn’t thinking about Phineas, and how he had abandoned them, though. She was just thinking about how he had saved Phillip from the fire. All she felt at that moment was gratitude.

Anne heard a sigh from the other side. Phillip’s parents still stood apart from the group, not making a move to come closer, making no attempt to even appear worried about the safety of their son.

“He made his choice,” Phillip’s father said to his mother, looking at Anne with distaste. “If he dies, he chose it.”

Phineas looked away from Phillip’s unconscious body to stare at Phillip’s parents, expression half shock and half rage. “Get out,” he said. “Get out right now.”

Phillip’s parents simply turned and left without looking back.

Caroline and Helen began to sob, running to Anne, and crawling into her lap. She held both girls protectively with one arm, and Phillip’s hand with the other.

“I-is he going to d-d-die?” Caroline asked, barely able to get the words out.

“Of course not, love,” Charity said gently, trying to find the words to comfort her daughter. “Phillip’s strong. He’ll make it.”

She gently leaned over Phillip and whispered to him. “You have to wake up Phillip. There’s no way the girls can lose their big brother, and we can’t lose our boy.”

“Chairy’s right, Phillip,” Phineas went over to stand by his wife’s side. “You had better wake up. I need my over compensated apprentice back. I need my boy back…”

The girls’ sobbing became louder, and Charity and Phineas looked at one another.

“We should get them home, Chairy,” Phineas said, looking over at Phillip with obvious reluctance.

Charity nodded and gave Anne a hug. “If anything changes…” Anne nodded. Charity didn’t need to finish.

“W-W-Wait!” Caroline said. She went cautiously to Phillip’s side, before leaning over and kissing his forehead lightly. “Come back to us, Phillip.” She was so quiet Anne almost didn’t hear her. “Please.”

“We love you, Phillip,” Helen whispered from her mother’s arms. “You’re gonna wake up.”

Phineas looked at Phillip one last time, the pain in his eyes almost too much to bear. Then, Charity gently took his arm and they left, talking in low voices so the girls wouldn’t hear.

“I suppose it’s just you and me now, Phillip,” Anne said softly. “Let me tell you a story…”

_The darkness was suffocating._

_It wouldn’t have been so hard to bear if Phillip wasn’t so completely alone._

_He had never been scared of the dark before, but now it terrified him more than he cared to admit._

_He lay there on his platform, unable to move, hands still tied. He wanted to scream in frustration, like if he yelled loud enough, someone would come and save him. Like that would happen. Nobody ever had helped him before, why would anyone save him now._

_Then he heard a voice, the voice that made his stomach flutter and heart soar. There she was, Anne. Flying above him on an invisible trapeze wire. “_

_Guess it’s just you and me now,” she said with a sad smile._

_She landed next to him, and miraculously his bonds fell away. It was as if just being near her set him free. He tried to stand, but Anne gently held him down. “_

_Let me tell you a story,” she said, taking one of his hands in hers._

_“Once upon a time,” she said. “There was a girl, a princess, actually… and we’ll call her… Anne,” She gave a little laugh at that. “I’m not very creative, am I? Now, Anne lived in a kingdom where the people were looked down on. Judged because they were different from all the other people in the world. Just because Anne looked different from everyone else, she and the rest of her kingdom were spat at, and looked down on.”_

_S_ _he looked at him meaningfully before continuing. “Anne was happy, of course, the people of her kingdom were her family. But Anne still felt as if she were missing something. That maybe if the people would stop staring at her, then she would finally be satisfied. But she knew that would never be, the people of the other kingdoms would never stop judging her, they could never change. Boy, was she wrong.”_

_Anne gently leaned down and kissed his forehead before continuing._

_“_ _One day, a prince from one of the other kingdoms came to Anne’s. We’ll call him… Phillip. Anne knew the moment she saw him, that she loved him. But how could she ever tell him? He was of another kingdom. He wasn’t like them. He would only laugh at her, wouldn’t he? But Prince Phillip proved her very wrong. He didn’t scorn and laugh at her. He took the scorn and laughter from the other kingdoms right alongside her. It was difficult at first, and Prince Phillip’s parents tried very hard to get him to come back, but he didn’t. He was strong and brave and….” Anne broke off, wiping something off her face. Maybe Phillip was imagining it, but the darkness around him seemed to become less oppressive, light creeping in. Anne took a deep breath before continuing._

_“He tried to tell Anne he loved her, but Princess Anne didn’t believe it was possible for them to be in love. One night, there was a fire at the palace. Princess Anne couldn’t make it out right away. Prince Phillip didn’t hesitate in running back in for her…” Anne bit back a sob. The darkness was definitely fading now. Phillip could hear voices besides Annes. “It was at that moment that Anne knew she couldn’t be without him. Anne is going to stay by Phillip’s side, praying every day that he’ll wake up….”_

“And he will wake up,” Anne finished. “You will wake up, Phillip. And I’ll be right here when you do.”

That’s when his hand moves in hers.

His eyes flutter open, wincing from pain as he registers her above him.

“You’re here,” He said. Sounding like he didn’t believe it.

Anne leaned down and kissed him. She couldn’t hold herself back any longer. Anne no longer cared about what people would say. She had her Phillip back, and with him, she could take on the world and all it had to say.

“I heard your story,” Phillip said. “I heard what everyone said. I thought I dreamed all of it.”

“Oh you did, did you?” Anne gently touched the side of his face. “Everyone will be glad to hear that. What did you think of it?”

“I loved it,” Phillip said with a pained smile. “But you might want to work on the names.”

Anne actually laughed at that. It was a wonderful sound to hear. “Phillip, I’m so glad that you’re alright.” She leaned down and kissed him again, and all of Phillip’s nightmares, all the pain, faded into the background. All of the bad memories were just that, memories. Now it was about the future.


End file.
